Penguinsdotmoohdotorg

2008-04-07T16:38:00.003+02:00

Imagine, for a moment, that your boss asks you to write a very detailed report on what you've been doing. Then imagine that it has to cover every conceivable detail. Then imagine that everything you did was right. Then imagine that your work covers three years. Then imagine that you've got one of those anal retentive perfectionist personalities, and so even your crappy diagrams have to look perfect. Then imagine that your boss isn't even going to look at that report. That's a thesis in a nutshell.

Seal

2008-04-01T19:55:00.002+02:00

I'm writing again.

First of all, I performed my first rick-roll today. It was glorious. There was a message board on Facebook, chock-full of pro and anti seal-hunt sentiment. Emotions were high, arguments specious. I felt that I should do my best to add to the discourse on the board, so I found my favourite link to Rick, and pasted this message in:

I think anyone that supports the seal hunt should see this first hand to see how cruel you can be to small animals:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU

I then sit back, and wait for the replies to come - you know, someone would get it, and figuratively scream in agony as they get rolled. There will be general ROFLing. Instead I get nothing. I give up, and go to get a coffee. When I return, I'm the recipient of a message from some random person called Dylan:

I'm very curious as to whether or not that video is ANOTHER video made by PETA or the Sea Shepherd organization to spread their lies and propaganda. I'm also curious as to why you'd bother joining a group that supports the seal hunt when you so obviously do not. You should educate yourself

Yes, Rick Astley is a member of PETA.

Then, a random link appeared to me in my newsreader. It's a link to the exhibition for Stanley Donwood in Japan. Linked off there is a blog. It's about his creative process, and I save it in my newsreader to have a read of later.

And then I write this post. You see, I realised something. The internet is the great democratiser, it gives anyone with a browser a voice. It's communication on a massive scale. However, the truth of the matter is you don't want to talk to anyone. What you really want to do is listen to people who do know what they're talking about. People with some kind of authority. That's the real magic. Right now, I can read the musings of an artist, and learn about his creative process as it happens. It's there, available to me, raw and direct. It allows modes of communication between people that would never otherwise have existed. However, it also introduces noise. Noise like debates over seal hunting - essentially emotional and moral debates, which are repeated ad nauseum on an annual basis, when the latest flock of high school graduates decide they want a cause to give meaning to their life.

No, I'll care about sealing when I find someone whose business it is to know about this. Someone who is actually hunts seals for a living. A scientist who is caring for the ethical treatment of the animals. Until then, I could not care less about the ramblings of activists one way or the other. Unless someone is stupid enough to give them power, in which case, it's my business to make sure they don't screw me over.

I know, there's a great deal of irony about posting this rant up on the interwebs. But a) you don't have to read this and b) I wanted to gloat over a fantastic rick-roll.

I'm back

2007-12-11T13:42:00.000+01:00

For those of you who haven't been talking to me on Faceblerg, the blog is back, after a small technical hiccup. I still don't have time to write anything - but at least you can read the old stuff again!

Office woes

2007-08-13T11:34:00.000+02:00

For the past couple of weeks, I've been avoiding writing Word documents or opening up Excel spreadsheets as my installation of Office had mysteriously died. I took the time out on the weekend to prepare my laptop for a full reinstall, since I figured the machine was getting massively hosed from all the different things I've been trying out on it.

I ended up not doing the reinstall, as I kind of wanted to put an encrypted home directory (I fear the Government) on the machine, which would mean archiving off my iPhoto library, which would mean spending US$25 on a tool to do that. All of which was a bit much for a Sunday afternoon. So, I stuck with the suboptimal install on the machine.

It's lucky I actually did that, since I finally got sick of the problem, and googled myself a solution. It turns out, the problem lies with updating the prebinding. Basically, prebinding is a performance hack used to make dynamic libraries not so dynamic, and is generally a very good thing. Unfortunately, a number of Java dynamic libraries (from older versions it seems) were breaking the prebinding, so the whole prebinding operation was failing, resulting in our lovely Rosetta applications failing too.

The fact that I can actually go in to the console, play around with prebindings, and fix my computer when it stops working optimally is one of the reasons I love using Mac OS X. It's like the best Linux ever.

Hiren is writing a blog post.

2007-07-12T18:05:00.000+02:00

Like some kind of zombie, I'm back if only just to let my dear RSS enabled readers know that I'm still alive. It's summer, and I've been pretty busy. I went to Barcelona last month, which was a massive hoot. Last week, I was in the slightly colder Dublin (no pictures I'm afraid). Those of you waiting for an overly long blog post or essay, I'm afraid you're going to have to wait a bit longer. The abundance of summer BBQs and other outdoors activities (coupled with an increased workload) mean that I don't have time to write my usual drivel. If you're after poorly formulated drivel, you can always hit me up on Facebook, where you'll find craftily crafted status messages written in the third person. I'm considering the implications of taking Facebookisms into the real world - talking in the third person, running around with a spray can tagging people. Following these people around for hours, only to get bored, and then to start following their (good looking) friends around, until you finally find yourself amongst a group of people banding together to try and get someone's child named Batman.

Late night photoshop session

2007-05-31T02:12:00.000+02:00

You can't Dutch this

2007-05-04T15:12:00.001+02:00

Last week I didn't spend much time hooked up to the digital sewer pipe that is the internet. Instead, I spent a week in the Netherlands, ostensibly for the EUROCarbDB annual meeting, but in reality it was yet another excuse to meet up with the Glyco-cabal that I've been getting to know over the past 5 years, and chat over a few tasty Belgian beverages.

We had our group meeting in a place called WageningenNetherlands. This place is known as the Life sciences city - a surprisingly accurate tag-line, since it's a largely drab city with a tiny social and entertainment district, and often smells of chicken and cow manure. On the upside, at least I didn't have to pay for being there. It was of course, good to meet up with the old crowd again - I keep running into Niclas all over the place, Tina was around, and I got some good time in with the other team members in EUROCarbDB. We had a pretty successful meeting, and in an uncharacteristic wellspring of optimism, I left thinking that the whole thing could actually work.

A quick note about drugs in the Netherlands. For a country that's meant to be all liberal about drug usage, I saw hardly any people smoking in the country. It's not that smoking was banned in all these places - there were ashtrays at every single table I sat down at - but it just seems like people don't particularly like smoking. I'd like to say that's a clear message that prohibition and control doesn't work, but I think it's more of a sign that the Dutch care about their health too much. It must be all that bike riding that they do.

After spending time in Wageningen, Alessio and I stuck around in the Netherlands to hit Utrecht and Amsterdam. Joining us on our little adventure was Anita and Sarah - from HeidelbergDeutschland. Getting out from Wageningen, I found the rest of the Netherlands to be a much cooler place. I've been singing the praises of UtrechtNetherlands to anyone who will listen. Like my fawning over Gothenburg, Utrecht is a city with a really good atmosphere. It's primarily a student city, so walking around you see so much street art all over the place, it's a real feast for the eyes. Also - as Anita mentioned to me - although Heidelberg is a pretty town, it's more of a panoramic pretty town. All the good pictures of Heidelberg really need the castle or the old bridge in them. However, with Utrecht, you get the feeling that it's a bunch of really interesting smaller spaces. Spaces that reminded me of LondonUnited Kingdom 20 years ago. Walking around on the streets, amongst the buildings, I could have imagined myself riding my bike there.

AmsterdamNetherlands is another city altogether. It's cool, and it's bizarre, and it's big. It's not my favourite place though. I didn't feel as immediately comfortable in Amsterdam as I did in Utrecht. The big issue was that I fell into a bit of a tourist trap there. You go and do all the touristy things, and you end up missing out on the real value in Amsterdam, which is their great subcultures and street art scenes. To get into that you really need to know someone who is not only living in the city, but also is into the scenes themselves. I guess Amsterdam is like Radiohead. Both are great, but you really need to spend a lot of time with them to fully appreciate their character.

What you don't need time to get into is the Koninginnendag celebrations which were going on in the country on the 30th. The streets were filled with people, parties blasting out of every open window, and every second person with a turntable, massive speakers and stacks of wax. We spent a fair amount of time wandering the town, getting a feel for the whole thing. It's certainly an experience. The flea-markets during the day were pretty interesting, although I think you're better off going to Etsy to get your handcrafted goods. I ended up picking up a mid-century gas mask bag, along with a real life working gas mask to go with it. You never know, it might be useful some time in the future.

The tipping point

2007-04-13T07:43:00.000+02:00

I've been a little hidden for the past few weeks - as some people correctly surmised, I'm in the process of doing a spot of writing and coding. That, and I've been trying to take advantage of the great outdoors. It's actually been an unusually warm spring so far (if you discount the light snow that we had on the first day of spring), and bodes very well for the upcoming summer. The weather here is just about perfect.

OpenOffice and Subversion

2007-03-26T13:09:00.000+02:00

This post takes the nerd all the way to 11. I'm in the midst of writing up a big report, and naturally, I'm using LaTeX and OpenOffice to make up the documents, so that in the event of catastrophic machine failure, I can go back into the stone age and use Linux if I get desperate. Contingency plans are where it's all at. Anyway, my boss likes reading stuff in Word format, so he can make changes to the document there, so I just really need to export from LaTeX to Word. That part isn't so much of a problem - but I'd also like to keep track of changes I'm making to the documents and the diagrams. Each word document I make for my boss should live on a branch, and then I can merge in changes from the trunk back onto the branch and so on. Thing is, I can't figure out how to get any OpenOffice document to play nicely with version control. First of all, OpenOffice uses a binary format for its data, so there is no way I can add svn keywords to the document. The second problem is that there's a long standing bug in OpenOffice draw which means that I can't insert arbitrary fields into OpenOffice.org draw documents. This means that my drawings can't have a versioning watermark on them - which is useful if I've got lots of hard copies flying around. Does anyone have any ideas how to deal with this?

Snow? Snow?

2007-03-21T10:49:00.000+01:00

21^st March, and it's snowing here. Someone needs to do something about this. Now.

My Chemical Romance

2007-03-19T10:26:00.000+01:00

Sleep - when not being used as a verb - can often be used as a noun. Being a greedy little human, I try to get as much of this noun as possible. This endeavour is becoming increasingly hard nowadays. In the evenings, you're either working late, in the gym, down the pub, or doing all the domestic things that you haven't had a chance to do (such as late night shopping at Rewe or the Penny - 10 O'Clock shopping!). Looking over my average day, I used to wonder exactly how I managed to maintain any kind of chemical balance in my body. I don't eat particularly healthily, exercise happens in bursts - three times a week, the pub is all about the alcohol and copious second-hand nicotine (damn you and your lax laws Germany), and I spend my day at work downing cups of coffee to cover the lack of sleep I get.

I've learned to stop worrying about it now, and just to embrace the dream of better living through chemistry. To that end, I ordered a massive pack of Penguin mints. My trips on the bus in the mornings usually are pretty short - or at the very least they feel short as I fall asleep when I get on the bus, and then wake up at work. I tried my first bus trip this morning with the caffeine mints, and the mints work absolute wonders. I can now cut out coffee as a drink and go back to tea, since coffee was only really a drug delivery mechanism for me.

This whole practical usage of chemicals thing got me thinking about which other chemicals I could use to improve my health. The benefits, of course, need to outweigh the detrimental effects to my health (both long and short term), but I'm sure there's a whole world of chemical hacks you can make to get the best performance out of your body. In that spirit, I happened to come across this quote from bash:

<PhoenixBourne> Ok, so a friend of mine had an AWESOME idea at school <PhoenixBourne> You know rohyphonol? (whatever the spelling is) <linforcer> Is he gontna make a trebuchet <linforcer> no <PhoenixBourne> You know date rape drugs? <linforcer> Sure <PhoenixBourne> Right, rhyphonol is one of these. It knocks you asleep after an hour or two. <PhoenixBourne> I should also mention, a side affect of rhyphonol is amnesia of events whilst under influence of the drug. <PhoenixBourne> Now, a friend of mine had this idea: 1) Prepare ingredients 2) Take rhyphonol 3) Bake cake 4) Fall asleep 5) ?????? 6) Wake up 7) CAKE?! CAKE! Where did this come from?! <linforcer> SURPRISE CAKE!!!!!!

In the comment section I'll add any new ideas I have for practical usages for controlled substances as I come up with them, with an aim to have a list of 20(ish) innovative drug hacks. I welcome any suggestions on the comments.

Vindication

2007-03-14T13:26:00.000+01:00

I wasn't the only person who thought the ban of an ad where a toddler is driving an SUV was stupid. Boy, do I have egg on my face.

English is a beautiful language

2007-03-06T20:16:00.000+01:00

.. even though what they should really have done, if there was any justice in the world, is smash the desk to pieces, select the longest wooden splinters they could find, then drive them firmly into their imbecilic, atrophied, world-wrecking rodent brains.

This man, he is my hero.

Spiffing up

2007-02-18T21:14:00.000+01:00

I've spent a few hours spiffing up the photos section. It's now pulling data directly from my Flickr account, and making up a set of purty looking flash slideshows. You know it's cool.

Oz Day

2007-01-27T11:33:00.000+01:00

I had large plans for Australia day. Involving a BBQ and a case of VB. These plans had their genesis in my trip to Gothenburg, and witnessing the insanity that was the Dancing Dingo. The plan (basically) was to get a BBQ, trundle it out to the middle of Marktplatz, cook up food and drink beer in a safari suit, possibly wearing an Aussie flag cape. Like all my really good plans, it was wholly idiotic, and I had to give up after I realised I didn't have a BBQ, any VB, or a safari suit.

I tried to make up for it - I made a special trip to the Australian Juice store near my place, and had a chat to Steve, the guy running it. I felt kind of stupid just going in there to say hi, so I ended up buying a smoothie. For future reference, if anyone asks you if you want a cold drink in -2 weather, the correct answer is no.

Later that evening, I met up with Geoff and the fabled Amanda - two Australians who I had recently met. It was a good evening - thankfully no Waltzing Matilda being sung, and a decent number of brews imbibed. It didn't really compare to say sitting around in the sun with the Js in the background, but the weather turned out quite nicely - with the snow falling as we left the pub.

To be honest, I don't have much to write about in terms of funny stories, or pointless debate. I just wanted an excuse to post up a picture of the snow. It's the only snow we're getting this year.

Best website EVAR

2007-01-23T15:20:00.000+01:00

Di, let me know if you get this in the mail. Take a note.

Update 10/03/07 - Di actually got the letter. Unfortunately, they missed out on one wheel.

A shout-out

2007-01-17T16:23:00.000+01:00

I'm just completely missing out on all the big ticket blog posts. No Christmas post, no New Years post. Heck, nothing to even acknowledge that I'm back in Germany. Like a real PhD student, my catch-cry is that I'm just far too busy to write stuff in a timely manner. I'll make an exception just this once.

I learnt things at uni. Maybe not a lot - in fact certainly not enough to fill up 5 years, but I do recall knowing more stuff than when I came in to uni. Beyond learning some very interesting stuff about biology, a very important lesson I learnt while at uni was the power of the written word.

To deliver a stunning revelation, universities are known to have bureaucracies (I didn't learn how to spell that word in uni), and quite often, they get in the way of you doing things like going to classes. During my tenure at UNSW I developed a love-hate relationship with the bureaucracy. I loved the school of Biomedical Engineering, and I hated Computer Science and Engineering. I walked the tightrope of these two relationships, yinning the GSBME against the yangning of CSE. However, around the time of re-enrollment, my carefully nurtured inner balance was thrown off into a desperate pool of Yang. Since I was doing a special degree, information about what we actually had to do to graduate was scarce, and that which we did have was blatantly incorrect. The way the system did in fact work was that each student had to go to the school offices and conduct a proxy argument between the two of them. In order to make things easier, I'd put up an informational page up on my website (this was before blog was even a word), and quoted several important people involved with the discussion. I should really put the word quote in quote marks, since it was for one of these statements that I got into a little bit of trouble.

For future reference, when implying that someone called some other people a bunch of idiots - you need to make sure that you've got a verbatim quote. I had, inadvertently started a large argument between the two heads of schools, which I thankfully was not fully drawn into. From that little event I learnt that I'm not completely anonymous in the internet, and that if you write something down, you better be prepared to take responsibility for whatever you wrote. And if you want to say something controversial, be as obtuse as possible about it.

Another lesson from university - regarding copying. I'll be the first to admit that I may have plagiarised work during uni. Not all of the work I did was original to me. However, there was a certain mentality at uni which my group of friends fostered. We were (are) all smart kids back then, and so to get through assignments, we'd work together. I'd try doing the assignment early, and then distribute it to other people to review. They'd take good ideas from my assignment, and then do it in their own way. They'd provide feedback to me, and we'd all come up with solutions that are the best. It wasn't unequal in any way - everyone helped each other out. So, that's why I don't like straight copyright infringement in academia. The painful thing is, they often get away with it. Somehow, when you're a postgrad/postdoc/professor it's all ok to do such a thing. I know for a fact, that if someone had infringed my copyright, well I would have a personal interest in making sure that they didn't get away with it.

The last point I want to make is about where my loyalties lie. Generally speaking, I'm pretty damn loyal to people I've been through lots of stuff with. Hard and challenging times especially - parts of school, all of uni, my time at PSL, and now my PhD. Even in cases where I've got no formal association with the people I've worked with, I do tend to try to do my best on their behalf. This extends to work I've done before too - even if I got paid for working on it, if I've put months of work into it, not even counting the work other people have put into it too, I still feel like it's my crusade.

Finally, I'd like to say hello to the visitors to this site from two days ago, accessing the internet via Software Technology Parks of India in Indore! I don't know if this is a habit, but you missed reading the research section. I look forward to the communities response!

Officially on holiday

2006-12-21T01:58:00.000+01:00

It's been a month in the making, but I'm officially on holiday now. And I'm flying back to Germany in two weeks. You'd think that 6½ weeks would be really enough time to have a proper holiday, but it goes by really quickly. I'm already starting to think about packing my stuff back up again, and what stuff I need to send by parcel back to Germany. It's been good to catch up with so many people here, but I still haven't managed to see a whole bunch of people that I wouldn't mind saying hi again to. Sorry to those people I haven't managed to catch up with - I'll try and make my trips down here a little more frequent from now!

Navels professionally gazed

2006-12-17T13:12:00.000+01:00

This is beginning to sound a bit like a broken record, but I seriously haven't had that much time to sit down and hammer away at the keyboard to talk about what's been going on here. I'm usually back too late, or just too plain tired to get something which even has the vaguest semblance of structure and coherence out on to the big bad internet.

It's not as if I've got a shortage of things to talk about either. I've been thinking big things here. Thinking hard. Asking some tough questions. Coming up with some interesting (if not flawed) ideas and theories. It's just I can't really articulate them all that quickly when I type them out. I dream of the day where I can just sit in front of a keyboard, and in a stream of consciousness, produce something readable. Instead, everything has to go through several reviews, and quite often the stuff I've typed up never makes it out.

Anyway, one thing I'm pretty certain of is the lack of career potential in bioinformatics in Australia. As you might know, this is what I'm doing at the moment. The realisation comes from looking at what is going on in the field at the moment - who the big players are, which companies are established here (hint - I've worked for the one company that did bioinformatics in any serious way) and what the funding options are like. It actually looks really bleak for bioinformatics in Australia in my opinion, and why it always pays to have an exit strategy. If I was planning to continue my run in bioinformatics, I'd probably have to think about relocating on a much more permanent basis to Europe or the United States. Especially if I wish to remain in Academia, and play the funding game. Truth is, after what would be over 8 years of academia (interspersed by 2 years of commercial work), I've seen enough of how the funding game is, and I don't see it as something which is inherently winnable. The other thing is, after a while, I'm planning to come back to Australia permanently. I'd like to have something to do here which doesn't involve writing grants (which will probably be denied).

In the end, what this means is that you need to go back out into the big bad commercial world. Here's where the irony kicks in though. There's a lot of respect for the (purely academic) PhD degree. I'm not exactly sure why, but it's there. So you really need to have a PhD if you're going to be throwing screwball ideas around. Or at least, that's the current thinking. Get the degree, and get out into the big bad world as soon as possible.

This line of thought harks back to my What's up with science? post from a while back (most optimistically titled Part 1). There are really a lot of cool start up companies out there which deliver the intellectual stimulation you need from a job, while paying you a fair amount for the work you're doing. Is there a ceiling which you're going to hit if you don't have a PhD? Maybe the PhD preference is purely made up, and the truth of the matter is that PhD students are just killing time until they figure out what they want to do.

Ok, that was a bit ranty, totally unoriginal, but I needed to get that out there. For my German friends, I think I managed to burn myself at the beach today. I'm looking a healthy shade of red at the moment, and I may pay for this in a serious way not only tomorrow, but for the rest of the week. Wholly worth it though.

It's a jump to the left

2006-11-25T09:58:00.000+01:00

I may have prematurely said things about Taipei yesterday. Imagine, if you will, that you went to a city, only to hang around on Parramatta Road or Bergheimer Strasse^★. You'd see a bit of the city which is every part as real as the rest of the city, but doesn't really encapsulate the magic of the whole city itself. It was like that with me and Nanjing Road East (Section 1), it was busy and bustling - but the really cool Taipei was in a number of different areas.

Having a few hours to kill (Yesterday? Two days ago?) I headed out to walk around Taipei. I do that in all of the cities that I have time to go exploring^★★ in. I'm not sure if I'm practicing it, but it sounds a lot like psychogeographic drifting, where you let your feelings / subconscious guide you through the city. Put simply, if you're walking down a street and you reach an intersection - always choose the path which has the most shiny things, brightest lights, or loudest music coming from it. I'd love to be hooked up to a GPS, just to see where exactly my subconscious is taking me.

Anyway, I'd wandered myself off to Taipei 101 yesterday. It's one of the coolest buildings I've seen. Not only is it really big (which it really is), but it's also got a lot of great elements to it, acting as a shining example of both engineering prowess and design finesse. The interior is impressive, and the view from the top floor, looking out to the mountains surrounding Taipei is breathtaking. Naturally, I took no pictures. Somehow, I just didn't feel right walking around with a camera and acting like a tourist in Taipei.

I had a fair amount of fun there - Masha and Birgit can expect their postcards from Taipei within the next few days - but I was just absolutely zonked by the time I got back to the hotel, picked up my luggage, and set out on my onwards journey to Australia.

Thinking that you're late for checking in to your flight, having a panic set in, and not knowing the language really gets the adrenaline kicking in. From that point on, my plans for sleeping during the flight were purely academic. As soon as I got in to the airport, I was hit with this giddy euphoria - a knowledge that finally, after 18 months away, I was on my way back home. For those of you who were talking to me while I sat at the airport, you know what I'm talking about. I was looking forward to that instant of time when I look out of the window of the plane, and for the first time in far too long, I would see the water breaking on Sydney harbour, the lush vegetation surrounding it, and covered by a smoky haze, the vista of the city would be found in the distant background. That's what I look forward to when I come home to Australia.

As is my wont with these blog posts, I present a mild mental detour - What's the etiquette on picking up on plane journeys? If, hypothetically, a particularly beautiful person sat down next to you, is it proper to strike up an eager conversation with them? Do you really want to know the person sitting next to you? Isn't it just enough for them not to steal all your stuff when you go for a bathroom break? How do you even pretend to look civilised when you're digging into food with a plastic knife^★★★? As you may have guessed, I was faced with this dilemma - and in the end chose to try and get some sleep. What really got me though was that at the end of the flight she said "Bye, and Take care!". Thanks for the sentiment and all, but you do realise that the sum total conversation we had was variations upon "Excuse me", reaching a crescendo when I asked to borrow a pen? Then again, she was Canadian^★★★★, so you can't blame her eh?.

My feelings are pretty mixed now that I'm actually back in Australia. Admittedly, it's only been about 8 hours since I landed, but things don't really seem quite right here. Maybe I miss walking around in Heidelberg and being guaranteed to see someone. Maybe the city has changed in the time that I haven't been here. The traffic definitely is worse. Maybe everyone who lives here changed in the last year and a half. Maybe it's sleeping in a place which you know isn't your own. Maybe it's me who has changed. It looks like I might have to wait till I get back in to some kind of routine, spend some time with family and friends - really get into it, before I can decide what exactly it is that I have missed about my old life in Sydney so much.

★ - It's tough writing for two mutually exclusive readerships, but I apologise to Shaunak and Anita for unwittingly singling out the streets they live on.

★★ - Have a read of the writing style on that site! Horrible!

★★★ - I never noticed before, but you're right Caroline - they only give plastic knives on the Australian legs of journeys

★★★★ - It's not stalking if you're sitting next to the person right?

I love the smell of Taipei in the morning..

2006-11-24T03:53:00.000+01:00

Smells like... MSG. I'm not kidding. I landed yesterday morning, and the best way to characterise the smell is MSG. Or a Chinese restaurant. For those of you who are wondering what I'm doing in Taipei, or for what reason I've had an extended period of absence from writing (except on the music section), it's that I've been preparing for my return trip to Australia, which I departed on last night or something. I'm not even sure what time it is here at the moment, as I'm completely disoriented.

Taipei, from my impressions so far, is a typical Asian city. It's busy, a little chaotic, and reminds me a lot of Rajkot or Mumbai (the other two Asian cities I've been to). It's not ultra-slick like Western cities, but there's a lot of construction work going on, so maybe they're in the middle of installing the slick. Admittedly, I haven't had a chance to go around to do touristy things yet, as I managed to catch a full 20-odd hours worth of sleep last night. The flight across from Frankfurt was a killer. I don't know any of the language here - I can't even say hello, thanks, or anything. So everything around me is just noise, and I take pleasure in seeing the little bits of Engrish around the place. I haven't seen any particularly bad/great Engrish yet, but I'm holding out hope. It's also quite nice being a tall person here, and I swear I'm the only person of Indian descent in Taipei. The looks I'm getting are classic.

Apologies to Phill and Bhautik, I don't have pictures of Taipei (yet), and I don't know if I'll have a chance to upload them when I get back to the hotel this afternoon. I'm going off on a trek around Taipei today for a few hours, where I hope to at least check out Taipei 101, and some dock areas which I've been told are particularly cool. Unfortunately, Taroo and Michelle couldn't make it up from Kaohsiung for these past couple of days, but I might catch up with them on the return trip.

This one goes ouẗ to Jeremy

2006-09-03T15:53:00.000+02:00

I finally managed to get myself to Scandinavia when Aaron and I went to visit Fredo in Gothenburg (Göteborg) on the west coast of Sweden last weekend. It was a great place to visit, and I'm absolutely in love with the town. A huge thanks to Fredrik for putting the two of us up in his place. The trip was essentially to test a theory that I had about the Swedes - that is that there aren't any ugly people in Sweden. When I'm talking about ugly, I'm not talking about average looking people, but people who have actively beaten about the head with the ugly stick. My conclusions? There are some ugly people in Sweden, but the sheer volume of beautiful people there makes up for it. I'm not kidding. You've got to go there to see for yourself.

As usual, our departure from Germany was from Frankfurt Hahn (Was it only a year ago that I had to sleep there overnight?), flying to Gothenburg City airport. I'm not usually very pedantic about what people call things, but I don't really believe the Gothenburg City Airport is in any way appropriately named. While I agree that the Gothenburg moniker is right, it's neither in the city, or actually an airport. We landed and walked off to the arrivals lounge to pick up our luggage from the belts. When I say lounge, I really mean shed, and when I say belt, I mean tractor that the luggage arrives on. I've been to regional airports in India which have been more technologically advanced than this airport. Apparently it's all because of some construction work they're doing, but I don't really see them completing it this year (which is what their highly optimistic informational posters were telling me).

Our trip for the next day was to go down to an island near Gothenburg to check out the local landscape, and generally get some fresh air. Most of the pictures that you'll see at Flickr are from that trip. We jumped on the ferry, and after some initial consternation that we were trespassing into a military restricted area, we got to the island. That's where things went wrong. After walking off the ferry, I started to hear this very strange sound following me around. I'd stop to see what it was, and the sound would stop. It didn't take me long to realise the sound was coming from my shoe, where the sole had just decided to call off its long term relationship with the rest of the shoe. Needless to say, this breakup made things very uncomfortable for those people in the immediate vicinity (vis. Me). You can see a video of this in action if you're having trouble understanding the situation. We walked (and clopped) around the island for the rest of the day, marvelling at the mountaineering skills of sheep. When we decided to head back, the weather took a turn for the wetter, and the hole in my shoe went from amusing to annoying. Luckily Fredo has the same sized feet as me, so I could borrow a pair of shoes from him for our night out on the town in Gothenburg.

That evening, we ventured out to a jazz club in Gothenburg called Nefertiti. For those of you who've been to the Basement in Sydney, or Blue Note in New York, it's a bit like those jazz clubs, and nothing like the Cave here in Heidelberg. One of the striking things about the club was the lack of smoke inside. Being in Germany, you can't spend a night out anywhere without coming back smelling like smoke. In one of the only good applications of a EU wide harmonising I know of, smoking should be banned in pubs/clubs Europe-wide by 2010. I can only hope Germany decides to speed things up. The gig there wasn't too bad, standard jazz as far as I could hear, with a bit of soulful singing thrown in. Okay, yeah that's a terrible gig review, but I just can't write about Jazz. It either sounds good, or sounds bad. I wouldn't have a clue if they're doing it well or not. The only exception to this is the acid/abstract jazz I listen to. The weirder it is, the better. Regardless, the gig was not a bad deal for 50 SEK (€5).

After the gig, the club turns into a proper club. I can easily talk about the DJ here - he didn't have too shabby a taste in music. The selections ranged from dancehall, to funk, groove, hip-hop and jazzy house. Great stuff to both listen to, and to have a bit of a leg wiggle to. I'm thinking like the Music Box when Scruff is in residence (not that I've been there). You just don't find DJs with taste like that in a town like Heidelberg - the market is too small, so DJs have to play tunes which everyone knows, and in the end it's all dodgy pop and Tiesto. I think in larger towns (Gothenburg is about twice the size of Heidelberg), you get more of a chance to get these people who enjoy this type of music (who aren't that uncommon), and so you're more likely to find clubs like this. From the people I talked to, the club was also an exception in Gothenburg, but I'm happy to know at least one exists.

The other hallmark for the evening was the number of strange people we were talking to. The Swedes are pretty crazy people, I'm coming to realise. I don't know if it's common to all of them, but I've got a feeling their sense of humour is a bit warped, which is only a good thing. Unfortunately though, the strangest person I met that evening wasn't from Sweden. He was Jeremy, from Wales. I should describe Jeremy - a lanky guy with long hair, 43 years old, and walking around the club dressed like a pimp. Fur coat, brown suit, massive sunglasses, and a pimp hat. Totally pimp, apart from the fact that he's white. I was standing around in line, waiting to order another glass of wine (that's me being healthy), when Jeremy decided to start talking to me. I guess he heard me speaking English elsewhere.

From the moment Jeremy opened his mouth, there was a steady stream of effluent coming out, and it didn't stop until I managed to lose him later in the evening (by dumping him on Fredo and Aaron). For those of you who have seen Nathan Barley, this guy reminded me so much of the title character, it hurt. I reluctantly learnt that this guy is a former investment banker - retired at 30 after burning out - and is now lead "singer" in his band G-Suss. Conveniently, he just happened to have his cd in his pocket. You just never know when you're going to need to flog your band. Described as a cross between The Streets, The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, some other crap, and IDM, I was pretty much certain that he was full of it. Not being quite intelligent enough to know when to keep my mouth shut, a fatal mistake was made when I asked exactly what the titles of each of the tracks meant. Jeremy used this as an excuse to start quoting lyrics to me, and I learnt that Ian is a slang word for Charlie (which is itself slang for cocaine). A lot of the songs actually had something to do with Ian. Thinking back on it now, I'm pretty sure that the guy was himself loaded up on Ian.

Somehow, towards the end of the evening, we ingratiated ourselves with a group of Swedes, where we chatted until we got kicked out of the club when it was closing. I was very impressed with my commando run back into the club to steal back our jackets. I came back outside to see the group talking to the Black Mamba (that's another story). Eventually, we strolled off from outside the club in search of some food. Earlier in the evening, I had been talking to a guy who had a broken nose from a fight he had been in over mashed potato. You can't make this stuff up. I was sort of hoping we'd have mashed potato that evening, but instead we ended up in McDonalds, which is sort of excusable, especially if you're blind drunk. After we'd been in there for a bit, something new happened to me. I got kicked out of McDonalds because they were closing. Not only did we get kicked out, but they pulled out all the stops to get us out by switching on the alarms. I think that's the one and only time I've been kicked out of a place at 5:00 with klaxons. I wonder if they have a big red button which they press in case of loitering people. In the end, we decided to head back home at around 6:00, when the sun was just coming up. All up, a fantastic and memorable evening out.

One theme during the evening (and really for a lot of evenings out in Europe) was that people love Australians. People ask where you're from and they're instantly intrigued. The Swedes are especially intrigued, and quite possibly obsessed. In the airport bar, two of the beers you can get are Fosters (i.e. Crown Lager) and VB. VB! In an airport lounge in Sweden. Two of the four wines you could get there were Australian too. The best thing I saw would have to be at an Australian pub I visited there called the Dancing Dingo. They sold Coopers there. They had a bunch of very drunk Swedish guys in suits, holding stubbies of VB in their hands, dancing badly to some 80s music. It was like I was in some kind of bizarro world.

Speaking of bizarro - I watched Snakes on a plane. It was brilliant. It was sublime. It was ludicrous. I laughed pretty hard in places. For those of you who haven't seen it - make sure you look out for the people who die due to reasons other than snake related bites. The guy whose head gets stepped on is a personal favourite.

Next post: Ben in Heidelberg and anything else I've got time to write about.

Just take my money

2006-08-21T16:39:00.000+02:00

About a year ago, I'd talked extensively about how great Ruby is. I've now had a year in which to play around with the language, and it has continued to grow on me. I even started playing around with the latest, hottest thing on the development scene - Ruby on Rails. Okay, it's not the newest thing out there, but it solves a lot of problems very quickly. I've been using Ruby quite heavily over the past few months, trying to write up a complete library for some scientific endeavours, and the use of TextMate has been invaluable. It's a great editor. Unfortunately, it's got a 30 day trial, so I'm stuck without it at the moment. The academic version is only €29 though, so I should have no qualms about buying it. If you were to mug me for some qualms, you'll find that indeed, I have no qualms with spending the money. It's just PayPal has a lot of problems with taking my money. I've just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get it to accept my payment, and failing miserably. Why is it that I could pay for my Flickr account with PayPal, but it just refuses to accept my payment for TextMate? I'm coming to the realisation that the name PayPal is a complete misnomer - since you can neither Pay, and they are not very Pal like.

In the end, to actually get a license for it - I've had to ask Bhautik to buy the license for me. I suspect the problem lay in the credit card numbers not matching up with the physical location of the IP. I mean, I'm all for security, but you're making it very hard to make impulse purchase on the Interwebs. It's not like anyone would be overseas, or have multiple credit cards, or speak another language while living in a third party country, right?

Update: 6:30 Wednesday night - Just in case anyone asks, don't use the default install of Ruby on Tiger. Observe!

[hirenj@nerfherder SugarCoreRuby-gc]$ ruby -Ilib tests/tc_SugarGc.rb 
Loaded suite tests/tc_SugarGc
Started
.F
Finished in 0.049977 seconds.

  1) Failure:
test_simple_monosaccharide(TC_SugarGc) [tests/tc_SugarGc.rb:31]:
<[0, 1, 0]> expected but was
<[0, 1, 1]>.

2 tests, 1 assertions, 1 failures, 0 errors
[hirenj@nerfherder SugarCoreRuby-gc]$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [universal-darwin8.0]

This first run of the test fails. It's counting memory references of instances of a particular class (Monosaccharide in this case), starting at 0, going up to 1, and then going back down to 0 when the object goes out of scope again. I also call the garbage collector, since I'm not willing to wait around for my laptop to run out of memory. It looks like the garbage collector isn't working though, as it keeps that memory reference around.

[hirenj@nerfherder SugarCoreRuby-gc]$ ruby -Ilib tests/tc_SugarGc.rb 
Loaded suite tests/tc_SugarGc
Started
..
Finished in 0.04419 seconds.

2 tests, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
[hirenj@nerfherder SugarCoreRuby-gc]$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i686-darwin8.6.1]

The garbage collector works on 1.8.4. Lesson learnt? Avoid the default install of Ruby on Tiger like the plague.

Summertime

2006-08-09T10:12:00.000+02:00

I've decided to take a leaf out of Ben's book, and just give up writing a long explanation of why exactly I haven't been writing stuff for the past two months. You guys get a slightly expanded bullet point list:

The World Cup - That was a lot of fun. The character of the country certainly changed a lot, and you were never short of things to do on most nights. Yeah, usually that thing you ended up doing was going down to the Uni in the old town and watching it on the big screens there, but everyone was doing it. Also - Italy, I haven't forgiven you yet.
Visitors - When I wasn't watching the games (or at work), I was hanging around all the various kids who had come to visit me. Thanks for coming Yun, Henry, Mark, Mum & Dad and Fredrik - apart from the whole staying in Ziegelhausen thing (more on that later), I hope you had a good time in Heidelberg. Anyone else planning on coming up here, I'd suggest no more than two days to come and visit - you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to do if you stay around for much longer. Also - Yun, I haven't forgotten about Lesbian Unicorns, it'll be on it's way to you as soon as possible.
The Warren Workshop in New Hampshire - I kind of got a last minute call to go to a workshop just north of Boston at the start of July. It was generally pretty interesting, and it was also very cool to meet some really smart people working in the (general) area of my PhD, and having some people to bounce ideas around off. Also - Sherry, I did manage to watch Primer, and yes it's a cool, albeit challenging movie.
Beach time - OK right I know, technically I'm landlocked, but there was sun, sand and water. I'm a bit too stupid to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I took the beach at face value. I also managed to get a slight tan at the beach. Well, it's a tan, or it's been warm enough for circulation to return to my extremities. Also - Bhabhi, it doesn't really compare to even one afternoon of Jervis Bay. Can we go there when I come back?
Neckarwiesen - There's been a solid stream of BBQs on the river bank for the past two months. The nice thing about CEST is that it's still light at about 9:30, meaning you can sit out on the river till really quite late. It really feels like a proper European summer. Also - Fredo, I don't think the Bulgarian rowers find our casting options to be very flattering.
Macbook - I've got a new Macbook I'm typing this on (2GHz White). It's an amazing upgrade from my old Powerbook, and after I threw in 2GB of RAM, it's absolutely flying along. Hell, I even think that Eclipse runs semi-decently as an application now. Google Earth, iPhoto, Word, well - pretty much any application runs nicely on this. Also - Traini, it still isn't mooing.
The New Place - Ziegelhausen is out in the middle of nowhere. Anyone who has been here to visit can stand testament to that. At about the end of May, I began searching for a new apartment. After a few false starts, I eventually settled on an apartment slap bang in the centre of town. I'm still in the process of settling in there, but I don't think the feeling of walking out of the front door, and being amongst everything will ever get old. Just as a point of general interest, the building is about 300 years old. There'll be pictures up at some point of time, probably once I've finished unpacking everything. Also - whoever is planning on staying at my place next, you may want to bring a sleeping bag and air mattress, as you'll be sleeping on the floor.

I've got a request to the software kids behind Adium, MailTags, Skype, Camino and (Update) NeoOffice Aqua. Please release your next versions some time soon. I've been keeping track of the features that are going to make it into the next versions of your software, and it all looks really good.

I realise the Music section isn't quite working well at the moment. There's something wrong with the part of the page which contacts Audioscrobbler to retrieve my journal entries from there. It'll get fixed once I get internet access again at home.

Update from the Land of Soccer

2006-06-17T15:46:00.000+02:00

Yeah, I used the word Soccer. Call me blasphemous if you will, but it's just a much better word than Football. Why bother having to always distinguish between the different codes of football when you can just use the one word to refer to the one true sport. It's bad enough you have to draw distinctions between the different siblings in hockey and tennis. Strangely enough though, whenever I use the word soccer, I feel compelled to "correct" myself and throw in the word football. Like the word soccer needs some obfuscation thrown in.

It's been a little over a week now since the world cup started, and I'm feeling the effects. I've seen at least one match per day, gone to see two of them live, and had at least one beer at each of them (with some games like the Mexico vs Angola game where I had many many more). My venue of choice for watching the soccer is a place called Marstallhof, which is basically the uni canteen. They've got a screen set up outside, and you can sit around in the sun to watch the games. You get some pretty good crowds turning up - especially for the German games.

Let's start with the boring match review - France vs Switzerland. The majority of the stadium were out in support of the Swiss that day, while the French group around us were pretty damn vocal. So with support like that, the teams themselves didn't fail to disappoint. We were treated to a 0-0 draw, punctuated by lackluster efforts at the goalmouth. Admittedly, the Swiss had a few good chances - and were royally robbed by the woodwork a few times, but it's the goals that really get the stadium going. In fact, the crowd were so bored, that a large section decided to start chanting in support of Germany. That was pretty weird.

Sorry Ben, I won't harp on about the Swiss any more. Instead I'll harp on about the Australians. That was such an amazing game. I won't go on about the actual match, because I'm sure everyone will be buying the collectors special edition DVD from SBS. The stadium was amazing though, with mass euphoria breaking out at the pointy end of the match. Singing, dancing, cheering - everything. I'm glad I was there to see history being made, and I now have a deeper understanding about what the world cup is about, and the feelings it inspires in supporters. A couple of highlights though would be seeing George Negus and Peter Wilkins roaming around outside the stadium, making fun of the Japanese player with pink shoes, the chant of "Bullshit" going round the stadium for dodgy calls and the brilliant move by someone (couldn't see exactly who) who lifted up one of the Japanese players from inside the Australian penalty area because he was being too big a pansy.

After the game, we roamed the streets of Kaiserslautern for god knows how long, just randomly talking to other Australians (with me talking to some random Germans too - brushing up on my waffling skills). There was a lot of hi-fives being thrown around, some hugging and lots of cheering. On the train back, we just happened to be standing next to a guy and his son, who funnily enough came from Eastwood too - just near Rutledge street. It's a small world.

We arrived in Heidelberg and grabbed some food at a local Indian imbiss (which I may have to go to more often), and then walked down the main street. Now, here was the best bit - walking down the street, wearing my Australian jerseys proudly, people were coming up and congratulating us for the win. We were vicariously sharing in the victory that Australia had worked so hard to get, and even though I knew I did sweet bugger all to help the team, I was loving every single moment of it.